Oh, it's easy

The Acadamie has about as much control over how French people speak and write as the MLA has
over Americans, and while English has a larger vocabulary, French has a much larger collection
of tenses so that comparison isn't at all relevant.

I don't know how useful it is to compare a formal programming language to a natural language.
ALL natural languages are as much a collection of cultural references, idiomatic expressions,
notions, subtexts, and connotations as they are a grammar framing a set of semantics. That is
because that is how humans naturally communicate with eachother, but it is very imprecise and
not at all  suitable for a machine interface. 

I think setting out to try to 'deformalize' a computer instruction language to make it more
like a natural language is, essentially injecting imprecision and complexity into it such that
the semantics eventually are no longer reasonably deterministic and the behavior of the
machine becomes difficult to control and predict.